NIL adding layer to UT-A&M rivalry
For more than a century, Texas and Texas A&M hashed out their plentiful differences on football fields in Austin and College Station.
For the last decade, the primary clashes occurred in recruits’ living rooms after A&M exited the Big 12 for the SEC. For the past year, the old rivals have tried positioning themselves ahead of each other in a world formerly foreign to all but rapidly become more familiar: NIL.
“It’s happening right before our eyes,” A&M athletic director Ross Bjork said of the swift evolution of college athletes making money off their name, image and likeness.
That NIL evolution took another turn this week with the NCAA issuing guidance aimed at boosters — in this case, “collectives” geared toward specific universities — who are not to use improper inducements to recruit players.
The NCAA’S concern is that some collectives have gone beyond paying athletes for NIL activities such as endorsements and appearances and are offering cash to influence athletes’ decisions on where to go to school. NCAA rules prohibit boosters from making contact with prospective recruits.
“There have to be some kind of rules or guardrails. There’s no doubt,” A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher said last week.
While A&M and UT are among the richest universities in the nation — and therefore expected to be among the top beneficiaries of NIL luxuries, as they have been early on — Fisher is one of many college coaches in football and basketball calling for “uniformity” among the 50 states and their varying NIL laws.
An annoyed Notre Dame basketball coach Mike Brey had his own message for complaining coaches on Tuesday: Pipe down and call your plays.
“This is the world we’re in (and) last time I checked (we) make pretty good money,” Brey told reporters at the Atlantic Coast Conference spring meetings in Amelia Island, Ga. “So everybody should shut up and adjust. That’s the world we’re in now.”
Easier said than done, of course, especially with the NCAA this week pledging to use its enforcement staff to “review the facts of individual cases (and) pursue only those actions that clearly are contrary to the published interim policy, including the most severe violations of recruiting rules or payment for ath
letics performance.”
In other words, the already oft-toothless NCAA will try to go after glaring cases of collectives swaying athletes with NIL deals before they arrive on campus, even retroactively to this month and dating to last July. Last year, the NCAA ruled that on July 1, 2021, college athletes were allowed to earn money for endorsing products, signing autographs or otherwise using their fame to promote businesses without jeopardizing their amateur status.
Fisher abhors suggestions that he signed the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class this past February in part because of plush NIL deals through a collective tied to A&M. He also appears to welcome any investigations into his program.
“We’re tough, we’re hard and cheating ain’t something I’m going to do,” Fisher told a gathering at the Houston Touchdown Club last week. “I don’t believe in it, never have done it and ain’t going to.”
The NCAA does not agree, considering in the summer of 2020 the governing body placed A&M football on one-year probation and banned Fisher from all off-campus recruiting for the fall 2020 contact period following what the organization dubbed violations concerning “recruiting and countable athletically related activity rules between January 2018 and February 2019.”
In any case, Fisher vows the Aggies and their boosters have done nothing wrong in the past year on the NIL front. A&M has kept its primary collective — called The Fund — low-key at least for now. The fan website Texags.com, with its headquarters across George Bush Drive from A&M’S practice fields, has been active on the NIL front on behalf of the university, offering paid interviews to players.
Although Fisher has not allowed his three quarterbacks competing for the starting job in 2022 to visit with the media, veteran Haynes King has signed a deal with Texags for exclusive interviews leading to the season.
While Texas running back Bijan Robinson announced earlier this month he had signed a deal with an Austin Lamborghini company (presumably to drive a Lambo), nothing quite that extravagant has come out of College Station — yet.
The “Clark Field Collective” associated with the Longhorns was announced in December with an initial $10 million in reserves and with the “ultimate goal of having the largest dedicated fund in the country for college athletes,” per organizers.
Also late last year, a new nonprofit organization called Horns With Heart pledged to pay all Texas scholarship offensive linemen $50,000 per year in exchange for access to the linemen’s name, image and likeness and for them to take part in charitable endeavors.
Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte declined to comment on the NCAA’S memo.
Blake Lawrence, a CEO of a company helping athletes and universities steer their way through NIL, said he expects scholarship football and men’s basketball players in the major conferences to “soon” each earn a minimum of $50,000 annually, thanks to the boost from collectives, according to the Associated Press.
More than half of the 65 Power Five schools already have collectives raising NIL money, the AP reported, and that number is growing.